Distraction Free Writing

Is such a thing possible?

What am I even doing with all these things?

In his on-stage Q&A at the recent NCTE conference, Percival Everett shared that he drafts his novels in “embarrassing” notebooks (the kind associated with grade schoolers) with a pencil. He uses email, but is not online at all, meaning at all, and I believe him. He expressed no struggles with distractions other than an ingrained willingness to toss work aside if someone offers any more tempting offer whatsoever, such as going to the movies. He remarked that he has never uttered the words, “I can’t because I have to work.”

For sure, there is some element of privilege to being able to say this, namely a profession that allows the individual significant freedom and flexibility in scheduling their activities (a condition I share), but there’s also clearly an intentionality behind all of it: the notebook, the pencil, the absence of the internet, the willingness to go do something in the world other than work. It’s not like the man is slacking. He’s published something like 35 books since his 1983 debut (Suder). Since 2017 he’s produced what I consider to be a series of masterpieces, including Telephone, and The Trees, and culminating with James, which won a Pulitzer Prize and sold lots and lots of copies.

Everett has a practice that works for him, and that allows him to focus at times when focusing is necessary and to drift when drifting provides intellectual, emotional, spiritual sustenance that later nourishes the work.

I would say that I’m jealous, except there’s nothing Everett is doing - practice-wise - that’s out of my reach. He may have an artistic genius that I can’t match, but there’s nothing stopping me from achieving a similar writing focus.

Well, except there is one thing. I cannot write by hand.

I’m capable of jotting notes, bullet points and that kind of thing, but I physically cannot capture a sustained train of thought when writing by hand. To some degree this has always been true. In grade school I was consistently marked as “needs improvement” for handwriting on my report cards, and I retain memories of deep, careful concentration trying to make my lowercase loops touch the dashed line on the notebook page that have nothing to do with whatever I was trying to say.

In More than Words (and also at this old IHE column), I described how learning to type was a kind of liberation for my thoughts as I could finally capture them at something close to the speed with which they happened.

Essentially, if I can’t type, I can’t write, but over the years the distractions available when I am at the machine on which I type have steadily increased. The internet, of course, but long before that I had to delete the old Minesweeper game from my Windows 3.1 system because playing it before I’d hunker down for a writing session in graduate school (1994-1997) became a delaying tactic and distraction.

Experiencing a little resistance before kicking off a session of writing is utterly natural, maybe even close to universal. Writing, done meaningfully, is difficult. Productive difficulty in writing involves engaging in the struggle of communicative written expression, and corralling the words that properly express one’s meaning will always be challenging the same way that lifting weights or learning a new piece of music will be challenging. The challenge is how you know it’s working.

(In fact, one of my chief objections about secondary education pedagogy utilizing templates like the five-paragraph essay is that it removes some of the necessary difficulty and struggle of writing.)

But even once initiated, many of experience another challenge of staying in the challenge. How many of you have had the experience of getting rolling on a piece of writing, feeling pretty good about things are going, finally getting down some stuff that you know is going to be useable and then immediately having an urge to do something, anything else?

Again, this impulse has been so widely reported by writers of all stripes that I believe it’s something close to universal. I think it’s akin to the body’s reaction at the start of heavy exertion where your pulse and respiration will take what may feel like an alarming and unsustainable leap. As your body leaves stasis it sends some signals of alarm a kind of “Are you sure you want to do this?” message. With experience, you learn that following that initial alarm, your body can settle into sustained exertion as the system adjusts to this new state.

The urge to stop writing once things are going well is, I think, the same thing. It’s like your subconscious is telling you, “that bit is good, so you better quit while you’re ahead, and before you do something not as good.” The most important part of my personal writing practice is my capacity, honed over years, to push past that urge to stop as soon as something good starts to appear. To the extent I’m prolific, that ability is entirely attributable to my willingness to just keep going for a relatively extended period of time.

But…I still frequently fail at achieving this state and the culprit, in my mind at least, are the distractions available to me. Even as I’ve been typing this post in the Substack interface I have received a notification of a new Substack-related event. Someone has liked or commented on something I’ve done. There is a 99.99% certainty that this notice is non-urgent, and yet it is tempting, as is the browser tab I have open to BlueSky, as is the other one open to YouTube, as is…as is…

(Note, I’m not even talking about the distractions of life. That’s a whole ‘nother, significant thing.)

There’s lots of available methods for training oneself away from giving in to distraction. Many people I know swear by the Pomodoro Technique, a pre-internet time management method where you use a timer to set 25-minute intervals of work followed by 5 minutes of rest/distraction with a 60-minute break after completing four pomodoro units. I’ve experimented with this method, but ultimately found it counterproductive because once I’m rolling, I can do a couple of three hours in reasonably sustained concentration on a writing task. I would take the five-minute break even though I didn’t need it and found it harder to get back to the task.

There’s also apps that will shut down your phone for a period or focus browsers or word processing interfaces that silence notifications on your computer and narrow the visible field on your screen to the text on the page. Given that I’m often referring to some source or information while I’m working - like I just searched whether or not it’s called the Pomodoro Technique or the “Pomodoro Method” - I don’t necessarily want to wall myself off from the internet either.

But, I’ve also long envied the longhand notebook writers of the world who say they can sit down with their blank page and their stylus and let it flow. My grad school professor Robert Olen Butler told us how he wrote his first several books longhand while riding the Long Island Railroad to his day job. Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, and Elena Ferrante have all said in interviews that they wrote their books by hand. My friend Keith Morris (The Dart League King) not only has written his books by hand, he’s done much of it sitting in a specific booth at a Clemson campus bar. (They’ve added a plaque to the booth in commemoration.)

What’s a guy to do if he wants this experience, but also literally can’t write by hand?

Enter the “distraction-free” writing device.

What you’re looking at there is a Freewrite “Smart Typewriter” that I ordered pre-launch in 2016. The most recent characters display in that window, and page up/page down allows you to scroll through the document. The e-ink display means it can hold a charge for weeks. It’s bulky, but it comes with a handle at the top in case you want to carry it around. It generates .txt files which can be uploaded to a dropbox (connected to Google docs) by wifi or you can connect to a computer via USB. The device itself has three folders (A, B, C) and you can have as many documents as you want within each folder. It’s actually pretty similar to the Brother personal word processor I took to college, except that it doesn’t print anything on its own.

I have no idea how much text it holds because I drafted a total of maybe 5000 words on it over a series of weeks before putting it away and then packing it in a box when we moved in 2022, not unpacking it until I retrieved it from garage storage for the purpose of taking these photos.

Given that I was an utter failure at utilizing this device you may wonder why I picked up this little number a few years later.

This is the Freewrite Traveler, again purchased at a significant discount pre-release under the theory that the reason the Smart Typewriter didn’t take is because it is a bit awkward as a piece of equipment. (Though that full mechanical keyboard is a delight.) Maybe the Traveler with its clamshell design, making it easy to stash in a backpack, would be preferable. Given its capacity to hold a charge for weeks I envisioned taking it on vacation as my daily writing/diary repository. Leave that laptop at home! All I need is this thing on which I type the words that come from my head.

The record of production on the device reflects that I drafted three of my Chicago Tribune columns on the device and then never produced anything again.

But hope springs eternal!

Enter the Freewrite Alpha, again purchased pre-release because it promised a fix for my other chief complaint of the Smart Typewriter and Traveller, the lag between typing and what appeared on the e-ink display. Because of the delay, wanting to make sure what I’d intended to say was actually captured resulted in a halting, stop/start, method of production. The Alpha was said to have optimized the hardware so that the delay was as minimal as possible. While a great improvement on the previous models, e-ink will never approach the speed of pixels on screen, and I also found out that I can’t work on something while only seeing three lines of what I’ve done.

(In the intervening years Freewrite redid the firmware for The Traveler, reducing the delay significantly, to the point I may give it another go sometime, but we’ll see.)

As failed as these experiments have been, they did reveal something about my writing, my practice. The writers who express a preference for longhand say that they appreciate how it forces them to slow down and be deliberate in their choices.

Apparently, in that first drafting stage, I do not want to be overly deliberate. At the same time I am not one of those word vomit writers who can pour out 1000 words in a big rush without stopping.

In my practice I want minimal deliberation for essentially the duration of an extended thought, after which I’m going to go back and see what came out.

Not to get too meta, but in the initial drafting, everything between the image and this current sentence was drafted in an extended bit of flow inside of two minutes.

I seem to write in these kinds of chunks, after which I’ll go back in the immediate aftermath and do some editing/tweaking, because sometimes I’ll find that I haven’t even made a complete sentence. I draft, I go back to a previous chunk, read, revise, edit, re-filling my brain with that flow and then when I get to the end of what’s composed, I have enough momentum to add more words to it.

It’s like…have you ever watched a Zamboni driver resurface the rink? Each trip up and down the rink they take a partial bite of the already resurfaced bit in order to make sure that there’s no gap in coverage. I think my method is a little bit like that when it comes to that initial draft, which means I need to be able to move forward quickly while also having the capacity to go back over what I’ve already done.

I don’t know where any of this comes from other than it’s evolved over time and is something I’m entirely comfortable with and at least sufficiently proficient at. It is my practice.

One of the things I hoped for students in my first-year writing courses was for them to become mindful about this aspect of their practices, the manner in which they go about their work. In some cases, this meant starting from scratch as the experience of the kind of concentration I’m talking about was mostly or entirely foreign. I’d have students report that a draft of 750 words - something I could produce in 15 or 20 minutes provided I’d done some requisite pre-thinking - would take them four or five hours. I assigned these students “distraction journals” asking them to record the particulars of their own work. Some would report experiencing dozens of interruptions an hour. We’re talking a decade or more ago. Things are obviously worse now.

Over the course of the semester students would work to bring their practice in line with their wishes. If you don’t mind stewing over a draft for five hours flitting back and forth, fine. But if you want to get through it more quickly, that can be worked on.

It’s important to emphasize, however, that this is not a matter of having sufficient willpower or grit or character to “resist” the distractions. This gets the causation backward.

The goal, the need, is to find something more fascinating than those distractions. This is why you find me at my desk Saturday mornings working on this newsletter, finally having the chance to work though something I’d been thinking about over the previous week. I could be on my phone, or watching Netflix, but I want to be here.

The rub is that there is often some element of friction between us and that more fascinating experience, but once past that initial resistance, the friction becomes heat, energy, fuel for something enduring and useful, a practice.

Links

This week at The Chicago Tribune I share some other things I learned at that NCTE Percival Everett Q&A.

At Inside Higher Ed I rounded up some recent higher ed news and wondered how we can countenance some of these things and still call these places universities.

Naomi Kanakia shares some fascinating reflections on short stories of every stripe.

CrimeReads has shared their best crime, mystery and thriller novels of 2025.

The New York Times has declared their 10 best books of the year. I’ve read zero of them. Slate’s Laura Miller also names her top 10. Again, bupkis for me.

My friends at Field Notes have released a cool new notebook series based on the Armed Forces Edition paperbacks. The release contains a full, original version of Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon. I’ll be taking to Kevin Guilfoile, who wrote the introduction to the edition, about this project and other stuff in a future newsletter.

For the right audience, this piece from my friends at McSweeney's will be one of the funniest things they’ve ever read: “The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner Interviews Santa Claus.”

Recommendations

1. “Hamnet” by Maggie O’Farrell
2. “Nickle Boys” by Colson Whitehead
3. “Yellowface” by R.F. Kuang
4. “Circe” by Madeline Miller
5. “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah

Billie P. - London, England

When I see mostly recent, mostly well-known books I have a strong urge to go the opposite way. This is a risk because this novel is more out there than anything on this list, but I think Billie can handle Charles Wright’s The Wig.

I’ve been greatly enjoying a few weeks at home after a busy fall of travel, though I’m also excited to have some engagements for 2026 coming on line. If your school, college, or organization wants help figuring out how to build enduring writing practices, I’m available.

That’s it for this week. My next two Tribune columns will unpack by Biblioracle Books of the Year, which perhaps I’ll reflect on more here.

Or maybe something else will be on my mind. You never know.

Take care,

John
The Biblioracle